CFP: "Hollywood Film Style and the Production Code: Criticism and History"
Call for papers: “Hollywood Film Style and the Production Code: Criticism and History”, a special issue of The Quarterly Review of Film and Video.
Schedule: 300-500 word proposals/abstracts, along with a short bio, to tom.brown@kcl.ac.uk by 01/08/2022.
10,000 word draft chapters will be due in June 2023 for publication in the journal in early-2024.
Almost 30 years since the Quarterly Review of Film and Video published a special issue on the Production Code edited by Lea Jacobs and Richard Maltby (1995; 15:4), the time is ripe for a re-consideration of the Code’s aesthetic impact on Hollywood. Facing head-on the vexed question of the interaction of industry regulation with the tone and style of films themselves, the essays in the collection look closely at the detail of film form while closely considering broader and more specific histories of Production Code Administration (PCA) regulation and the self-censorship it encouraged.
The 1995 special issue was a landmark moment that bequeathed a number of important and valuable things, including a more complex understanding of what the oft-cited shift of 1934 meant for Hollywood (i.e. the setting up of the PCA under Joseph Breen’s direction). The nuances of Jacobs, Maltby et al’s positions on this shift and their engagement with aesthetics are, however, sometimes now forgotten due to other broader and, I would contend, less positive consequences of the “historical turn” (and subsequent turn and turn again) of which issue 15:4 was a part: a greater reliance on “what the archive shows” at the expense of criticism/close film formal analysis. The disavowal of what we are calling “criticism” has seen subsequent film historians engage with film style less than may be desirable. Without in any way offering a nostalgic view of the often un-reflective and narrowly textual ways in which the study of earlier periods of filmmaking was once pursued (the introduction to the special issue will historicise the major gains and developments in the New Film Histories’ understanding of the Code), we will engage directly with the relationship between “criticism” and “history” in order to offer a new equilibrium for a style-based understanding of Hollywood cinema during (mainly) the 1930s, 40s and 50s.
A number of high calibre entries have already been secured. While the call for papers is an open one (proposals will be welcomed from a wide variety of angles perhaps unimagined), we would particularly welcome essays on the following topics:
- The representation of race during the Code era (including engagement with the notorious “no-miscegenation” clause)
- Queer and non-heteronormative characterisations
- The representation of Political topics, events and figures
- Criminality and policing
- Violence and the Code (as Stephen Prince [2003] notes, “violence” is never mentioned in any text of the Code, though “brutality” and other categories of action and behaviour are)
- Representing religion etc.
Essays should engage with these or other broader issues but also with the details of films themselves (perhaps via the example of particular “case studies”). The special issue’s guest editor (tom.brown@kcl.ac.uk) is happy to discuss ideas in advance of submitting a proposal.
Dr. Tom Brown,
Senior Lecturer in Film Studies,
Tel: +44 (0) 207 848 2018 (currently working remotely)
Film Studies Department,
King’s College London